The Jack of Ruin

by Stephen Merlino

  “Am I sure? Was I stuffing myself with the souls of his men when he tore by with his pants on fire? Hard to miss that.”

  Harric let out a long breath. “That’s our first stroke of luck in a long time. No way he’s getting past that fire to follow us. Not soon, anyway.”

  “He’s not so smart, lighting the place up like that. Looks like brains don’t come with immortal blood. Made me rush my meal, too.”

  “You didn’t see Abellia’s soul?”

  Fink shook his head, the grin falling from his face. “Sorry, kid. She wasn’t with the others. But then, she’d avoid that sort anyway.”

  Looking back toward the hillock, Harric said, “What I meant about it getting worse was that the ring’s getting worse, Fink. You said we could take a look at it in the Unseen. That maybe you’d be able to understand how it works and maybe get it off her? Can we do that tonight?”

  Fink shrugged his bony shoulders. “Let’s go see.” He motioned for Harric to lead the way back to camp. “Maybe I can, maybe I can’t. Won’t know till we look.”

  Harric led them back, and soon spotted yellow lantern light at the base of the hillock where Caris had picketed the horses. When they drew within a stone’s throw of the lantern light, he signaled a stop. Using his regular eyes in the Seen, he could see her sword flash and hear it thunk! in a log as she drilled herself in sword strokes.

  “She’s still up.” Harric chewed his lip. “At least she’s distracted with training.”

  “What about the Kwendi?” Fink asked. “We need to worry about him showing up?”

  “Brolli is supposed to be out watching the ridge with Mudruffle. They probably won’t be back unless he has something to report, and since it sounds like Bannus won’t be coming down the mountain, we’re probably fine. Still, we should be careful.”

  “All right,” said Fink. “Let’s have a look at her. Take off all your clothes.”

  Harric stopped and looked at Fink out of the side of his eye. “What? Why?”

  Fink’s grin became a leer, an expression distinguished only by the sheer multitudes of teeth visible and a quirk to one side. “It takes effort to hold yourself in the Unseen, as you know. It takes even more effort to hold your clothes and gear in the Unseen. That’s one reason you didn’t last too long on that ledge the other night. If you’d stripped naked first, you might have made it all the way across without passing out. Of course, then your friends would’ve wondered why the moons you were naked when you finally showed up, so pick your poison. Tonight, I’ll hold you in the Unseen because I want you to be able to concentrate on other things, so I ask you to leave the unnecessary gear behind.”

  Harric blinked.

  “You’ll get used to it. Might even like it.”

  Harric grimaced. “Fink, if Caris finds me walking around in my undershorts one more time, she will think me mad.”

  “Unless she likes it.”

  “Enough, Fink.”

  “You think this is an elaborate ruse for me to get you naked?”

  “Well, you could translate my clothes, right? You’ve done it before when helping me.”

  “Sure I could. But if I do it for very long, you’ll start seeing my ribs again, and I’ll get hungry.” Fink spread a very toothy grin. “Real hungry. Got souls for me? Didn’t think so. So strip down and get used to it. We’re going to be naked together a lot.”

  “Lucky me. But I’m drawing the line at shorts. Not only will I not spy on her naked, but I don’t need splinters when I sit, or to freeze off my unmentionables.”

  The newly plump Fink bobbed his head. “All right, you can keep your under-the-pants.”

  “They’re called shorts.”

  Fink waited, apparently bored, as Harric undressed.

  “Nice bum,” said Fink, when Harric had removed his breeches.

  “Fink, look—”

  “Kidding. I’m kidding! But it’s exactly what you expected me to say.”

  “I’m not really in the mood for the jokes tonight.”

  Harric bundled his boots and clothes and set them beside a tree, but, after a thorn in the heel, put his socks back on. “I can’t walk around barefoot, Fink. Can you manage socks and short pants?”

  Fink raised a hairless eyebrow and shrugged. “Socks and short pants it is. Some spirit walkers make little slippers for the Unseen. You should do that. Now show me how you enter the Unseen.”

  Harric glanced toward the lantern light, uneasy. “Maybe you should just go and then tell me what you saw? It would look really bad to be seen like this.”

  “Seen? You won’t be seen as long as I’m helping you. Anyway, you have a lot to learn, kid, so you need to come and see and listen.”

  Harric sighed. “All right. Just don’t get think of getting a laugh by popping me back into the Seen half-naked.”

  Show me your horse and I will tell you what you are.

  —Sad Bella, horse-touched stabler of the Two Colts Inn

  35

  The Unseen Seen

  Harric closed his eyes and looked out through his oculus.

  The imp sat before him, watching. “Show me how you enter the Unseen.”

  Taking a deep breath, Harric relaxed his oculus and pushed his mind up as if he would climb through. He surprised himself by slipping halfway out, and the spirit world suddenly surrounded him in three dimensions. Luminous smoke-blue filaments filled the air, wavering like river weeds in some sleepy pool of the Arkend. He had the impression of having risen halfway through a hole in the bottom of the river. The burden of supporting himself there, however, fell upon him so hard that it nearly shoved him back through.

  “Fink—!” He gasped as his temples gave a sudden throb of pain.

  The weight and headache vanished.

  “That better?” said Fink.

  “Thanks.”

  “Tomorrow night, we’ll work on your stamina.”

  “Can’t wait.”

  Fink motioned for him to follow, and pushed ahead through the curtains of strands as if they were nothing more than smoke. The Unseen altered sound, as well. The sounds of Caris’s sword work were slightly higher, but also amplified, like sound in fog. As Harric followed Fink, he parted the strands and moved through them easily, but they tugged as if he passed through heavy cobwebs.

  Fink clambered to the top of a tall seedling log about thirty paces from Caris’s camp and beckoned to Harric. When Harric eased himself up beside him, he crouched and surveyed the area she’d chosen to camp. She’d hobbled the horses at the base of the hillock. Her bedroll lay beside the horses, but instead of sleeping, she’d hung a lantern on a branch while she ran through her parries and strokes and thrusts against a rotten stump.

  The sight of her spirit stole Harric’s breath. She seemed nothing short of a goddess come to earth. Bright, broad strands bloomed from her like rays of sun in deep water. Numerous as the hairs on her head, these upward-flowing ribbons leapt from her like wings. She seemed a being of fire and air and light, and the majesty of it dazzled his mind.

  To his eye, she moved as if in a dream. Sound dimmed. Her sword arced around her in lazy sweeps. Her strands rippled upward, drawing his attention to the open well of the moon above, deep and black. The moon swallowed all strands of all life around him, so it seemed he looked up into the vortex of a whirlpool in the sky. It even felt that he himself rose to meet its embrace.

  Intruding whispers nattered at the edge of awareness. Irritatingly urgent, they persisted until Fink’s horrific proboscis appeared upside down before Harric’s face. “Wake up, dreamer boy!” Fink croaked.

  Harric staggered and felt himself step into open air. He fell about a fathom from the log onto soft ground, but he hit it hard enough to knock the wind from him. He mouthed the air, trying to shout, but before he regained his wind, Fink clapped a hand over his mouth and sat on his chest, newly fat legs straddling him. “Easy, Harric. You fell into the Siren Sleep.”

  Harric struggled to pull the imp’s hand from
his mouth, but Fink’s grip was iron.

  “Harric?” Caris called softly from somewhere nearby.

  Harric froze. He remembered he’d been watching her.

  “Souls, kid, you’ll give us away.”

  Pieces of the situation fell back in place in Harric’s mind: Fink was not hurting him; Caris was near. He needed to be quiet.

  The imp’s milky eyes narrowed. “You going to shout when I take my hand off?” Harric shook his head. “Good.” Fink removed his hand and clambered off Harric.

  Harric looked around. His mind gradually cleared of the dream fog, and he recognized where he was. The last thing he remembered was studying Caris’s soul and… A lump of dread sank in his stomach. “Damn,” he muttered. “I did it again.”

  Fink nodded. “See what I mean by lots to learn? Looking too long at a soul is just like looking at the moon. Mortal eyes can’t handle it. Now, if you chose to be a Spirit Reader, I’d train you in ways to look and avoid the Sleep, but that’s a whole other school of mastery. As a Spirit Walker, you have to avoid looking even at your own soul. Understand?”

  Harric swallowed, then nodded.

  “In your defense,” Fink whispered, “she’s a real beauty. I mean, don’t get me wrong—on the inside. Her heart. Her personality.”

  “Shut up, Fink.”

  “Just don’t look too long or they say you’ll go blind.”

  “Did I say shut up, or just think it?”

  “Harric?” Caris’s voice drifted to them, eerily warped by the spirit fog. She’d climbed to the back of a seedling log at the edge of her camp, sword over shoulder, a hand on her hip in an show of impatience. After staring in their direction for a few heartbeats, she hopped back down and returned to her training.

  “Let’s try it again,” said Fink.

  They crept back to the top of their log and together peered through the curtains of filaments. This time, Harric made sure not to look at the whole, and to look aside when he felt it beginning to hypnotize.

  “Where’s Sir Blue Balls?” Fink whispered. “Shouldn’t he be giving her pointers?”

  Harric snorted. “He wouldn’t be alone with her at night. Wouldn’t be proper.”

  “What a guy.” Fink nodded to Caris. “So. See the ring?”

  Harric nodded. Now that his mind was clear, he could see among her strands a huge band of burning white silver, like a barrel hoop as tall as a man. The hoop plunged into her chest and out her back, enwrapping great sheaves of her strands and pulling them to one side like a reaper gathered standing wheat before the sickle. Her strands did not seem impeded or harmed by the hoop—there was, in fact, no sickle to be seen—but it was a clear manifestation of the wedding ring.

  Revulsion and anger gripped his guts.

  “It’s a weave called an Opening.” Fink’s bubble eyes fixed on Caris. “Mother Doom, how do they do that?”

  “Do what? You said it was Unseen magic. Can’t you do that weave?”

  Fink’s proboscis wrinkled like a dried-out black tuber. “Of course I can do the weaving. What am I? A novice? What nobody knows is how they put weavings in that impossible metal. Imagine how useful it would be if we knew how to store weaves like that, kid. We could put enough Web Strand in a bit of witch-silver for you to run around in the Unseen with all your clothes and fancy boots, too—just stored in the metal, waiting for a time you need it.”

  “And there’s an Opening in this one. What’s it an opening for?”

  Fink shook his head. “It isn’t an opening for something—it’s an opening of something. Seventh Order love weave.” He tore out another clump of moss. “The little chimpies are working Seventh Order Unseen weaves into their witch-silver, and they don’t even have Unseen servants to help them.”

  Harric turned his eyes to Caris and watched as she danced, flowed, drove at the rotten stump. The hoop seemed to burn and smoke as if alight with spiritual fire.

  “But what’s an Opening do?”

  If Fink heard him, he ignored the question. Harric was about to repeat it when the imp let out a low hiss. “Let’s start with what it isn’t. It isn’t a Compulsion. A Compulsion is a mind-control weave, and it’s focused on the head—the eyes in particular. A Compulsion’s only a Third Order weave, but what it lacks in the finesse of a higher-order weave, it makes up in raw, bludgeoning power. It makes the target kind of stupid—mindlessly devoted, all doe-eyed and mush, laughing too loud at jokes and all that. Be glad this isn’t a Compulsion. An Opening leaves their head alone and goes straight for the heart, where it does just what it sounds like—opens the heart toward the ring giver and creates trust and emotional bond. So an Opening affects the head, too, but only indirectly.”

  “And you can do one, or take one off?”

  “An Opening? Sure. It’s complicated, but I can set one up. And I could take one off if I’d made it myself. But since this one isn’t my work…” Fink frowned in the direction of Caris. “I’d have to know how it was applied, or I could hurt her. Plus, I don’t have any idea how they put it in that witch-silver, so I don’t know how to get it out, either.”

  Harric felt his heart sink. “Hold on, Caris,” he murmured, too faintly for her to hear him. “Can’t help tonight, but soon.”

  One of his strands had drifted over to Caris. Then he realized there were several already streaming toward her and tangled in the Opening. A sick feeling rose in his stomach. “It’s using my strands. That’s how it fixates her on me. By forcing my strands on her.”

  Fink nodded. “The Opening needs an object. You’re the object. But don’t look all horrified, kid. It won’t hurt your strands. It just strengthens and directs her attention to you.”

  “Anything I can do to remove them?”

  “If you could, they’d just go back there.”

  Harric’s eyes traveled the path of his strands from his own column of brilliant soul-ribbons to the Opening in her chest. The diversion of his strands was very subtle. He hadn’t noticed before because they didn’t go directly from him to the Opening, but first rose toward the moon with the rest of his strands, and then arced across among Caris’s strands and into the Opening. As he watched, another of his strands peeled away from the rest and looped into the Opening.

  Harric flinched. “I just lost another one.”

  “Relax, kid. They’re always attaching and detaching depending on how close you are.”

  “So, if I run away, more of my strands will detach?”

  Fink looked at him. “Is this a hypothetical question, or are you about to go ‘wild man of the wilderness’ on me?”

  Harric sucked a deep breath and closed his eyes. I am being an ass. Caris’s entire heart was ensnared in an Opening weave, and he was panicked about a few of his own strands. He forced his breathing to calm, so his heart would stop racing. “Sorry.”

  Fink leered—a grin out of one side of his needled mouth. “You’re welcome.”

  Caris had paused her training. Breathing heavily, she swabbed her face with a sleeve and peered in the direction of Harric and Fink. Her shirt clung to her, damp with sweat. The Opening, bright and large as Harric himself, gradually ceased to smolder and waver. As he watched, the spirit fire flickered and died, leaving a white band amidst the smoke-blue glow of her strands.

  Fink extended a taloned finger toward Caris, his brow wrinkling. “What’s that behind her shoulders? How many rings does she have on?”

  After a moment, Harric saw what Fink was looking at. In the bright welter of her spirit strands lurked another hoop. It was harder to see because it was smaller, and a translucent gray, like the ghost of a hoop. The longer he studied, the more it resolved, and he saw it as a thin hoop plunging between her shoulder blades and the back of her head.

  Dread breathed a chill into Harric’s guts. “It goes in her head, Fink.”

  Fink nodded. “Probably a Mind Compulsion. It must be dull like that because it’s not active yet.” He cringed as if imagining it active. “But kid, I thought you said
it was just one ring. There’s more?”

  “An Arkendian wedding ring is actually three rings interwoven to make one.”

  Fink met his gaze, eyes narrowed. “Molded together, or separate?”

  “Like a chain, only three links long. When you line them up and put your finger through, they fit together like one ring.”

  Fink turned his attention back to the gray rings. “Clever little chimpies.”

  “It’s Arkendian design. The Kwendi copied it.”

  “You want me to say your people are clever?”

  “Just clarifying.”

  “Clever little Arkendians.”

  “But that means there must be a third one,” Harric said. A new weight sank in his gut.

  “Lucky for you, I don’t see… Oh,” said Fink.

  “Don’t say ‘oh.’ What do you mean, ‘oh’?”

  “I should have known,” Fink muttered. “Look below her belt. This one’s active.”

  Harric looked, and the weight in his stomach became a driving fist. He held his breath until he finally spied the third hoop. Like the Opening, it glowed white-hot and plunged between her breasts and out her back. But instead of looping upward and soaring above her like the Opening, it looped downward, re-entering beneath the belt in front and back.

  “You aren’t going to like this, kid.”

  “I can already guess.” Harric’s stomach turned. “It’s another Compulsion.”

  Fink nodded. “Yes, but this one’s a Body Compulsion. Simple, strong. Not mind control, but…real hard to resist that for long. Dangerous.”

  Harric’s gaze snapped to Fink. “How? What do yo mean?”

  “If horse girl jumps on you, kid, she’ll break you in half.”

  “This isn’t funny, Fink. And the issue isn’t what might happen to me. For her sake, I can’t go near her anymore.”

  “Souls, kid. Why not just kiss her? Make it a lot easier for both of you.”

  Harric sighed. “Why is it I feel you can see into the worst parts of my heart?”